Blogging for decades
I started blogging when I was high school which was the late 20th century. My very first blog was on OpenDiary.com. What drew me to the idea of online blogging was less about wanting to be cutting edge and more a very desperate attempt to seek and receive so sort of validation.
The 90's aesthetic is staggering.
In retrospect, I was a profoundly depressed kid those years and spent a lot of time in my head being sad and angry with no idea what to even do about it. Finding a place to write online was a breath of fresh air for a few reasons.
- It gave me a place to just think that I didn't think anyone close to me would find 1.
- People with similar perspective were there, could find what I write, and comment. he vast majority of my early online experiences with public writing were positive. People on the internet were cutting edge dorks and the idea of community very strongly guided the direction of the web. Lock-in wasn't a thing like it is now.
So as a kid that needed to connect with people and feel safe, this was the first place I got both 2.
From OD to DJ to LJ and beyond.
I wrote at Open Diary for the last 2 years of high school under two pseudonyms - EverSilent and Lysander. The former was really how I always felt - forever silent - and liked the irony of using that name while writing constantly. The latter was the more gloom-y perspective I had on my future. Lysander loved Hermia. Mermia's father chose Demetrius to wed her. Lysander and Hermia ride to run away, were caught, and Ensor led by Puck and manipulated to love different people. You know... great comedy 3.
I wrote as a semi-jilted but non-magicked version of Lysander. It was one of few ways I felt comfortable writing poetry which had always been my favorite writing mode. I just had a lot of social pressure to not do girly things and familiar pressure to learn "useful skills" so I could go to college and get a job.
I wrote there for about 18 months - the last year and a half before going to college. College presented an opportunity to recreate myself so I stopped writing under those names and moved to DeadJournal. DJ was the open version of :LiveJournal where, t the time, you couldn't just sign up. You had to be invited to LJ. Very chic. DJ had no such concerns4.
I wrote there for like.. 3 months maybe? Before a college friend gave me an invite and I signed up. Well.. not immediately because I needed a handle.
What's in a name? Would a Bunnyman smell as sweet?
College was a Big Awakeming for me. I found people who thought like me and actually liked me as I was. I hadn't really experienced that before? At least not in a way I could recognize as an unconditional relationship. No, college was great and I fit in really well. So, when presented with the opportunity to sign up for a service exclusive enough that I'd know like most of the people using it, I had to consider carefully.
EverSilent? No. I'm not really that so much. I wasn't social per se but I definitely wasn't always quiet. Lysander? Well no that was already taken and how uncool to be named after a Shakespeare character.
What would better represent me as I was now? Going through all the random things I did in high school and prior, I fell into an old archive of art I used to make. I drew a really terrible comic strip called "Let's Take Billy With Us" briefly my junior year - I made it like 16 before I got too upset at my bad art skills. the story of that strip us probably a whole other thing to write about but suffice hat every character was some sort of me exaggerated. My favorite character was a cigar-smoking, disabled army vet that swore a lot and wore a rabbit suit to help keep him grounded.He acted as the more realistic, if tragic, foil to the main character Billy. His very on-the-nose name, the name I still use to this day?
Angry Bunny Man5.
10 more years
I wrote on LJ for another 10 years before they got bought by a Russian firm and the site started going a little down hill. I went through a few iterations of the name - like "ABMann" when I was doing more professional photography around 2008. My Flickr account of that name still exists but I eventually "came home" to the original name when I decided I didn't care if people found me online and linked me back to more juvenile, literally, work. It's who I was. It's cringey sure, but that kid survived and got me here. I like who I am.
Not much exists online of that "Me." Though I did find this delightful thing from long since passed friend that summarizes how a typical day in LJ land went.
6
The way back machine has some choice archives.
Things change both a lot and not at all. Musings on writing. Musings on weight. Weird humor and references to James Joyce or HP Lovecraft. Love it.
Here and there but always back again
I did archive my entire LJ before I purged my account. It ended up being 6,000 pages. Imported all of that into my Day One journal so have effectively 25 years of writing stashed away in TXTs and PDFs in the cloud. I should dig some of it up.
I've used dozens of different plant forms between then and now and find myself having moved to a new one because the last one has stopped working and the support person has vanished. The last thing they said was something about the sheer size of my blog. And yeah, I get it man. There was a LOT of angst from my 20s still in there.
Now I find myself on Bear which looks to be a similarly light weight, can-do-everything-with-markdown simplicity that I want. TXT files keep surviving. I'm intending to convert my archives over from the last place because every single entry is a .MD file hanging out in a folder so it's just taking the time to copy pasta everything.
So anyway. Hello, Bear. Thanks for letting me rewrite the CSS so I can continue editing templates instead of writing. :)
Footnotes
I had kept a paper diary but my step brothers would get into it. The lock was far from robust.↩
The second place was MSN City Chat: Chicago1. If you could get into 1, man was that where the cool people were.↩
I ignored, of course, the happy ending that Lysander and Hermia eventually do end up together. But that clearly wasn't ever going to happen.↩
A cannot for the life of me remember my handle there.↩
Because he was a man, who was angry, in a rabbit suit[^6]↩
The icon is even a mock icon I made of him which is actually me in my first apartment with a copy-pastas pic tie of him covering my face. Man... the icon wars on LJ were epic.↩